Column One

A modest proposal

(With apologies to the Rev. Jonathan Swift)

(With apologies to the Rev. Jonathan Swift)

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country when they see the streets crowded with beggars of the female sex followed by three, four or six children, all in rags and importuning every passerby for alms. Or even not so subtly menacing them if they won't stand and deliver. These mothers, instead of being able to work for an honest livelihood, are forced to use all their time to beg sustenance for their helpless infants. As they grow up, the odds are they'll be low thieves for want of work, or just give up and leave their native country altogether.

We think it agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms or on the backs of their mothers are a great additional grievance and therefore whoever could find a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the commonwealth as to have his statue erected in a public square as a preserver of the nation.

We have been assured by a very knowing American that a young, healthy, well-nourished child at a year old makes a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome meal or between-meals snack whether stewed, roasted, baked or broiled, especially when doused with your favorite sauce whether spicy or mild or in-between. Consider olive oil or, for stronger stomachs, Looziana hot sauce. There's no accounting for tastes, as the old woman said when she kissed the pig. Good appetite!

For what are people for, anyway? What purpose do they serve that might not better be achieved with the help of some stuffing and a few slices of cranberry sauce? Make every day Thanksgiving! Why let all these warm bodies just go to waste? Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Whole Foods, all need more human resources, literally. The world of Soylent Green beckons with all its treats.

And what of our colleges and universities even if they're no longer colleges and universities so much as assembly lines? Call them knowledge factories, for they have everything to do with knowledge and nothing to do with understanding. For data is only information, not what we do with it.

As for our forests and mines, our mountains and swamp lands, roaring rivers and rich bottomlands, they're no more worth saving and protecting than our ever expendable people. So why bother? Our institutions of higher learning now specialize in the lower kind. And their administrators don't so much administer as wait for their next paycheck from the ever-generous taxpayers of Arkansas, formerly We the People.

Yes, we know, there are still superstitious souls who believe life is some kind of miracle, and that we're all created equal in God's eyes--but what kind of malignant ogre would have created such a world? And to top it off, pronounced it good?

Look on the bright side: We're getting rid of all these social undesirables anyway, what with abortion widespread. Special attention is still being paid to these lesser breeds without the law--especially those of the wrong color, class or creed. Why not get some good out of them while the getting is good? Why let all this perfectly good fodder go to waste?

There is only one sure sign of superior breeding in our society: the confederacy of dunces they still attract, the way honey does bees. For this God whose eye is on the swallow is too busy to keep it on mere human beings.

Here ends this modest proposal, and if it strikes you as immodest, please accept our apologies and regrets, which is the best a commentator in Jonathan Swift's style and tradition may be able to do just now. For satire has fallen to low estate, and the truth it reveals is considered only bad taste rather than classic literature.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 06/05/2016

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